[FIXED] Just How Broken Is Sea Star Of The Depthmother?

June 21, 2017July 8, 2017 by Niphyr

Update 28/6/17

So there was a hotfix overnight which slightly changed how the trinket works, bringing it more in line with other ToS trinkets. Depending on overheal values it’s still on top, but it’s no longer on top by as much. Here’s what changed:

Sea Star of the Depthmother’s Ocean’s Embrace now has an 8 second internal cooldown. The proc chance has been reduced slightly for Holy Paladins and Holy Priests.

Update 27/6/17

We are also very reluctant to change trinkets once players have them, which contributes to the perception of imbalance. If you spent 5 bonus rolls or wrangled a deal with a guildmate to get your Draught of Souls or Unstable Arcanocrystal, it’s going to feel really bad if we nerf it. We’ve applied a light touch to trinket tuning this expansion to avoid undermining that investment.

So this coupled with today’s hotfix of the Wild Growth bug with Sea Star, and the Class Tuning Changes for June 27 having just gone out – it looks like Sea Star maybe here to stay in it’s current form for this tier after all. Perhaps just tuning the proc rates will be enough to see its value fall in line with other options this tier.

If this is the case expect Sea Star to remain one of the best trinket choices, in particular for Holy Priests with a 50% proc rate on Prayer of Healing cast and Restoration Shamans with Chain Heal and neither having a cooldown.

TL;DR

Incredibly overtuned. Especially for Holy Priests and Restoration Shamans due to not having a cooldown on Prayer of Healing and Chain Heal while all other healing specs have a cooldown on theirs. We don’t expect this behavior to remain for long though so expect a hotfix in the near future. Check out the update above regarding trinket balance and recent hotfixes.

PTR vs Live

During PTR testing we didn’t think much of Sea Star (buff), the trinket from Mistress Sassz’ine in Tomb of Sargeras. It was performing at a fairly average level and the only thing really keeping it there was the healing ticks that go out were proccing our mastery. The values changed a couple of times but overall it was looking to be one of the poorer choices to pick up once ToS was out.

Come ToS release night, people started noticing a bunch of the trinkets had been changed in the dungeon journal so as usual, Naro and myself set about updating the trinket spreadsheet. Generally we can use a mixture of wowhead, wowdb and the Simulationcraft spell data to figure out the basics of how a trinket works with things like proc rates, ICDs and so forth. Then we jump on to the PTR and grab the trinket then confirm our calculations in game…

For some reason though usually the Simulationcraft spell data has the proc rate (RPPM), ICD and so on. This time it was no where to be seen. It also wasn’t on wowhead, which also generally has this info… this was likely due to it being a hotfix rather than a patch – I always get the difference mixed up when it comes to tooltips & data mining. Without datamined proc rates we turned to logs instead.

Investigating Logs

Not long after release people start sharing logs as usual, but unusually Sea Star has made a massive comeback and is producing some incredible results. Early logs show the trinket doing considerablymorehealing than any other trinket we’ve seen in a while… even more than Nighthold’s cake was post-buff.

Sea Star Log 1Sea Star Log 2Sea Star Log 3

Thinking this was pretty unusual we set about trying to find out what the proc rate for it was by going through a bunch of logs and collecting PoH casts per minute, haste rating and some other potentially related data. We knew this wouldn’t be 100% accurate but it should be enough to get the spreadsheet calculations close enough to properly compare it to other trinkets.

Sea Star Log Collation

An additional concern we had looking at the logs was the buff was overlapping quite a lot. Because it procs from PoH and because you tend to cast PoH in clusters when raid damage happens, we figured this was only natural (and it was clear there was no ICD). What was unusual though was often seeing 2 or 3 procs within a few seconds, which is incredibly rare in the RPPM world.

Initial indications were leaning towards it not actually being RPPM, but it actually having a percentage chance to proc when you cast PoH!

How Do You Know It’s Not RPPM?

RPPM normalizes the proc rate of trinkets by “banking” chances to proc since the last proc attempt, meaning that if you go 5 seconds without causing an event that would allow the trinket to proc, those 5 seconds worth of proc chances will be “used up” the next time you make an action that has a chance to proc the trinket. This “banking” of proc chances is capped at 10 seconds, so (excluding the bad luck protection mechanic) if you go 10 seconds without casting or healing anything, the proc chance you will have afterwords is equivalent to the proc chance after 30 seconds without casting or healing. However, the “lost procs” due to 10 second delays between casting PoHs are still not nearly enough to account for the extra procs, so our conclusion remains sound.

Testing In Game

After deciding the logs we had weren’t conclusive enough to decide this, we needed something spamming PoH more regularly to really confirm it wasn’t RPPM (Or was some crazy high CPM). Thankfully Ânemone on US-Sargeras came to our rescue and let me drag him to some mobs where we could get in combat and enable /combatlog then upload them here on warcraftlogs.com.

We ran several tests which was just Anemone casting PoH until he ran out of mana while in combat. The logs from these tests were pretty conclusive. Not only did he enjoy incredible uptimes of 85-100%, but it was proccing roughly once every 2 PoH casts… or an almost 50% proc rate which was similar to what we were seeing in the logs from Tomb of Sargeras.

Testing – Sea Star UptimeTesting – Total Overhealing

As you can see above, 32 casts of PoH resulted in 16 Ocean’s Embrace buffs, and due to Ocean’s Embrace also proccing our mastery this resulted in some really strong numbers. Keep in mind though PoH was only hitting 2 players, Anemone and myself. Ordinarily PoH would be doing much more potential healing in this situation hitting targets.

What About Other Healers?

28/6 – These proc rates are now out of date since today’s hotfix

A quick look at various logs for some other healers shows it has similar proc rates and is similarly as broken. Unfortunately for most of the other specs the spell that procs it for them has a cooldown.

note: This is an incredibly small sample size (especially discipline) to be pulling a conclusive proc rate from, this is just to demonstrate a similar thing is occurring for all specs.

Conclusion

28/6 – Check out the update towards the top of this post for information on the hotfix

Someone made a mistake. There is no way Sea Star (buff) was intended to do so much healing and have roughly a 50% proc rate on PoH cast so enjoy it while it lasts!

Because this trinket also procs our mastery we gain more healing than most other healing specs would from it. Due to it being an 8 second buff, and proccing so often when spamming PoH, you will notice a lot of overlaps while the trinket has this proc rate.

In addition to this, the spell we use that procs this trinket is PoH which has no cooldown. Besides Restoration Shaman’s Chain Heal, every other healer has a cooldown on their spell that procs this trinket!